“You ain’t never drunk lick before?” Tifty asked Vorhees.
Vorhees did his best to look offended. “Sure I have. Lots of times.”
“When did you ever drink lick?” Boz scoffed.
“There’s plenty you don’t know, brother.” Wishing he could hold his nose, Vorhees took a cautious sip, swallowing fast to avoid the taste. A blast of stinging heat filled his sinuses; a river of fire tumbled down his throat. God, it was awful! He finished with a wheezing cough, tears swarming his eyes, everybody laughing.
Boz drank next. To Vorhees’s embarrassment, his little brother managed to take a respectable sip without much more than a wince. Three more times the bottle traveled around the circle. By the fourth pass, even Vorhees had gotten the hang of it and managed a solid swallow without coughing. He wondered why he wasn’t feeling anything, but the moment he stood he realized he was; the ground lurched beneath his feet, and he had to put out a hand to steady himself.
“Let’s go,” Tifty said.
By the time they reached the dam, they were all giggling like maniacs. The passage of minutes had altered somehow; it seemed as if they had spent a long time getting there, and no time at all. Vorhees had a fragmented memory of hiding from a DS patrol under a truck but couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, nor how they had avoided capture. He knew he was drunk, but this fact was nothing his mind could focus on. They paused in the shadows while somebody—Boz, Vorhees realized, who was the drunkest of them all—vomited into a stand of weeds. And Dee, what was she doing here? Had she followed them? Cruk was barking at her to go home, but Dee was Dee: once she’d fixed her mind to something, you might just as well try to pull a bone from a dog’s mouth. The fact was, Vorhees loved Dee. He always had. It was suddenly overwhelming, this love, like an expanding balloon of emotion inside his chest, and he was working up the nerve to confess his feelings when Tifty stepped toward them from wherever he’d gone and told them to follow.
He led them to a small concrete building with a flight of metal stairs descending belowground. At the bottom was a maintenance shaft, dank and gloomy, the walls dripping with moisture. They were inside the dam, somewhere above the spillway vents. Bulbs in metal cages cast elongated shadows on the walls. A building rush of adrenaline had started to bring Vorhees’s senses back into focus. They came to a hatch in the wall, sealed with a rusted metal ring. Cruk and Tifty positioned themselves on opposite sides and heaved with all their might, but the wheel wouldn’t budge.
“We need a lever,” said Tifty.
He disappeared down the tunnel and returned with a length of pipe. He threaded it through the spokes of the ring and leaned in. With a squeal, the wheel began to turn; the door swung open.
Inside was a vertical shaft and a ladder leading down. Tifty produced a cap flare, scraped the striker, and dropped it into the hole. Tifty descended first, then Vor, Dee, and Boz, with Cruk bringing up the rear.
They found themselves in a wide tube. A spillway vent, one of six. Through these vents, water was released from the impoundment once a day and funneled down the spillway to the fields. Behind them lay a million gallons of water held in place by the dam. The air was cold and smelled of stone. A trickle of water ran the length of the floor toward the outlet, a pale disk of moonlit sky. They crept toward it, away from the light of Tifty’s flare. Vorhees’s heart was thudding in his chest. The world of night, outside the walls: it was beyond imagining. Ten feet from the outlet, Tifty dropped to a crouch; the others followed suit. Bars of heavy steel guarded the opening.
“I’ll go first,” Tifty whispered.
He moved on his hands and knees toward the end of the tunnel. Everyone else held absolutely still. In Vorhees’s drunken mind, seeing Coffee’s camp had become an ancillary purpose; the evening was a pure test of courage, its object irrelevant. The bars were sturdy enough to keep out a viral, but that wasn’t the danger; Vorhees half-expected a clawed hand to reach through and grab their friend and tear him to pieces. Through the lingering haze of the lick, the thought came to him that Dee must be afraid too, and that he might offer her some reassurance, but he couldn’t think of what to say, and the idea died in his mind.
At the tunnel’s mouth, Tifty eased up onto his knees, gripping the bars, and peered out.
“What do you see?” Cruk whispered.
A pause. Then, from their friend, two words: “Holy… shit.”
The tone hit Vorhees as wrong. Not an exclamation of discovery but of sudden fear.
“What is it?” Cruk whispered, more harshly. “Is Coffee there?”
“I want to look!” Boz cried out.
“Quiet!” Cruk barked. “Tifty, goddamnit, what is it?”
Vorhees felt it through his knees. A rumbling, like thunder, followed by a shrieking groan of metal gears engaging. The sound was coming from behind them.
Tifty jumped to his feet. “Get out of here!”
It was water. The sound Vorhees was hearing was water being released from the impoundment. One vent and then the next and then the next, moving in a line. That’s what Tifty had seen.
They would be smashed to pieces.
Vorhees rose and grabbed Boz by the arm to yank him away, but the boy wriggled free.
“I want to see him!”
“There’s nothing there!”
The boy’s voice cracked with tears. “There is, there is!”
Boz made a dash for the outlet. Tifty and the others were already racing toward the ladder. The sound of thunder was closer now. The adjacent tube had released; theirs would be next. In another few seconds, a wall of water would slam into them. At the tunnel’s mouth Vorhees gripped his brother around the waist, but the boy held fast to the bars.
“I see him! It’s Coffee!”
With all his might, Vorhees pulled; the two of them crashed to the floor. The others were calling:
Then the water arrived.
It slammed him like a fist, a hundred fists, a thousand. Below him, Boz cried out in terror. Vorhees managed to keep his grasp on the ladder, but could do nothing more; to release even one hand was to be swept away. Water swarmed his nose and mouth. He tried to call his brother’s name, but no sound came. This was how it ends, he thought. One mistake and everything was over. It was so simple. Why didn’t people die like this more often? But they did, he realized, as his grip on the ladder began to fail. They died like this all the time.
It was Cruk who pulled him free. Cruk, who would forever be his friend; who would one day stand with him while he married Dee; who would watch over his children on the day when everyone had brought the children for a summer picnic in the field; who would join him in the final battles of their lives, many miles and years away. As Vorhees’s hands tore away, Cruk reached down and seized him by the wrist and yanked him upward, and the next thing Vorhees knew they were climbing, they were ascending the shaft to safety.
But not Boz. The boy’s body wouldn’t be recovered until the next morning, crushed against the bars. Maybe he’d seen Coffee and maybe he hadn’t. Tifty never gave them an answer. Over time, Vorhees came to think it didn’t matter. Even if he had, there’d be no comfort in it.
By midday, the detassling crew had covered sixteen acres. The sun was blazing, not a cloud in the sky; even the children, after a morning of games and laughter, had retreated to the shelter. At the pump, Vorhees removed his hat, filled a cup and drank, then filled it again to pour the water over his face. He removed his sweat-sodden shirt and wiped himself down with it. God almighty, it was hot.
The women and children had already eaten. Beneath the shelter, the work crew gathered for lunch. Bread and butter, hard-boiled eggs, cured meat, blocks of cheese, pitchers of water and lemonade. Cruk came down from the tower to fill a plate; Tifty was nowhere to be seen. Well, so what? Tifty could do as he liked. They ate heartily, without speaking. Soon all of them would be dozing in the shade.
“One hour,” Vorhees said after a while, rising from the table. “Don’t get too comfortable.”
He ascended the stairs to the top of the tower, where he found Cruk scanning the field with the binoculars. His rifle was resting against the rail.
“Anything interesting out there?”
